George Bush’s Other Poodle

by John Pilger

Dissident Voice
January 17, 2003

Strange days in
Australia. "Paranoia in the lucky country", say the headlines in
Sydney, "Terror threat grips a nation". The government of John Howard
has issued full-page advertisements calling on Australians to protect their
"friendly, decent society" from terrorists within by spying on each
other. More than a thousand people have used a hotline "to report
things", causing grief to Muslim Australians. Asked if he thought it
better that Muslim women made themselves "less conspicuous at this time"
by not wearing their traditional headdress, Howard replied:
"Obviously."

Howard's is the
only government in the world willing and eager to join the Bush/Blair assault
on Iraq, a faraway country that buys Australia's primary produce and with whom
Australians have no quarrel. For those Australians yet to succumb to the
amnesia of the times, this is all very familiar, evoking a melancholy history
of obsequious service to great power: from the Boxer Rebellion to the Boer war,
to the disaster at Gallipoli, and Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf.

Some years ago,
I interviewed an Australian warrant officer who had served on a CIA-run
assassination team in Vietnam, and ruefully recalled to me the words of his
American commander. "We really like using you guys," said the
American. "It's like this: the British have the Gurkhas; we've got the
Australians."

In denying the
truth of this humiliating role, and mythologising the war fodder of its youth,
imperial Australian elites have kept the public in what a former deputy prime
minister once called "the mushroom club". "Like mushrooms,"
he explained, "they are kept in the dark and fed bullshit." A vivid
example of this is Australia's current role in the "war on terror".
Recently, the head of Australia's version of the SAS announced that his heroic
troops had "helped break the back of al-Qaeda" in Afghanistan. This
amazing victory, unknown to the rest of the world, was reported without a hint
of irony, let alone the truth of what Australian troops actually did in
Afghanistan - kill tribespeople without knowing who they were.

Mushroom Club
citations have been handed out. An Australian pilot beams from the news pages
with his American Bronze Star, awarded for flying Black Hawk helicopter
gunships "in combat". Untold numbers of innocent Afghan villagers
were killed by these gunship attacks; but that is beside the point. The
gormless television news begins with "heart-warming" scenes of
Australian sailors being welcomed home from the Gulf, where they are
"playing a leading role in the international community enforcing the
sanctions against Saddam". There is no mention of the human cost to their
fellow human beings, not a word about the latest, shocking UN State of the
World's Children report that child mortality in Iraq has tripled since
sanctions were imposed.

Unheard and
unheeded by the rest of the world, Howard is our mouse that roars. Almost
anything that falls from the lips of George Bush or Donald Rumsfeld is repeated
by him. When Bush announced that America would attack any country as
"pre-emptive" action against "those harbouring terrorists",
Howard chimed in and threatened Australia's Asian neighbours with attack,
demolishing what was left of Australia's diplomatic reputation in its region.
None of this almost comical warmongering is reflected in the public mood, as
far as I can detect. The task of humiliating England's cricketers has been far
more important. Moreover, half the population oppose Australian involvement in
an attack on Iraq.

Following the
Bali atrocity in October, in which many young Australians died, what was
striking was the public's restraint and mood of reflection; a number of
relatives of the dead have since called on Howard not to use the murder of
their loved ones to justify joining an unprovoked attack on another country.

In contrast,
"paranoia" and "threat" are daily media fare. A Mushroom
Club "exclusive" in a Murdoch tabloid, the Herald Sun, claims that
"terrorists train in forests in secret camps" near Melbourne.
Australia has the most narrowly based and tightly controlled press in the
western world. Seventy per cent of capital-city newspapers are owned or
dominated by Rupert Murdoch; in Adelaide he controls everything, including the
printing presses. The only national daily, the Australian, is owned by Murdoch.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, directly funded from Canberra, is
routinely intimidated. Much of the rest is Murdochism by another name.

This is
demeaning for Australian democracy, but never more so than now, when the
fabrication of a war atmosphere here surpasses any absurdity spun by Jack
Straw. The foreign editor of the Australian, Greg Sheridan, is not untypical.
Sheridan earned a formidable reputation as an apologist for the genocidal
Suharto regime, mocking the Australian parliament's study which revealed that
200,000 East Timorese had died under Suharto's brutality.

Now a crusader
for George W Bush, Sheridan's work is beyond parody. "Pilgerist Chomskyism
is ideologically fuelling the followers of Osama Bin Lenin, sorry, Laden,"
he announced last month. "Travelling recently in south-east Asia," he
wrote, "I was struck by how often, in the offices of Islamist activists
and fellow-travellers, I saw the works of Noam Chomsky, and somewhat less often
our own John Pilger [who] provide the Islamists with much of their interpretive
narrative of the west." News of this two-man conspiracy was displayed over
most of a page and illustrated by a caricatured Muslim swatting away
"facts" while reading Chomsky's books and my own.

On other forms
of "terror", closer to home, the hysteria is different. Imprisoned
behind razor wire in some of the most hostile terrain on earth, in what, by any
definition, are concentration camps, are refugees who have committed no crime.
Many are from Iraq and Afghanistan, the countries to which Howard is prepared
to send troops "in the cause of freedom". The racism is self-evident.
Mandatory detention does not apply to the thousands of Britons and other
Europeans who overstay their visas.

The conservative
former prime minister Malcolm Fraser has described these camps as
"hell-holes". Australians caught a glimpse of their horrors when an
ABC programme told the story of a six-year-old Iranian boy. Having spent a
quarter of his life behind the wire of Woomera camp in the South Australian desert,
he witnessed desperate adults set themselves on fire and a suicidal man
slashing himself. Silent and depressed, he refused food and drink and sat day
after day, drawing pictures of razor wire. The Catholic Commission for Justice,
Development and Peace has described conditions in the camps as
"institutional child abuse".

When the head of
the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Louis Joinet, was
finally allowed to visit Woomera and other camps, he said he had not seen a
more gross abuse of human rights in more than 40 inspections of mandatory
facilities around the world. The minister responsible for the camps, Philip
Ruddock, once boasted to me that Aboriginal infant mortality was
"only" three times that of white children. The Howard government
opposes the protocol designed to strengthen the UN Convention Against Torture.
Alexander Downer, the foreign minister, unwittingly explained why. He said he
did not like the idea of UN officials from the Committee Against Torture
arriving unannounced to inspect its refugee detention camps.

Racism is never
far from the surface in Australian politics. John Howard promoted a "One
Australia" movement in the 1980s, the precursor of Pauline Hanson's
campaign, with its veiled white-supremacist message. After years of political
failure, he took power in 1996, the beneficiary of an extraordinary public
cynicism towards a succession of Labor governments whose spin and betrayal of
those known here as "true believers" are acknowledged by Blairites in
Britain as prototypes.

Howard is now
lauded in the media for his "political skills". Having waged a war of
attrition against the Aboriginal people, denying them universal land rights and
incurring a shaming judgement of racism from the UN committee on
discrimination, Australian government policy is clearly directed at exploiting
the "threat" of non-European refugees - when, by any measure, there
is no threat. Some 4,000 asylum-seekers arrive illegally by boat in Australia
every year, one of the lowest figures in the world.

During the last
election campaign, in October 2001, it has since been revealed, Howard and his
ministers lied about refugees throwing their children into the sea, an incident
that was presented as evidence of their inhumanity. His re-election was
credited to this "tough stand". While he was telling his favoured
radio talkback bigots why it was kind to be tough, a leaking boat on its way to
Australia took 353 people to their deaths - including 150 children. Known only
as the Siev-X, it was overloaded with Iraqi refugees and in Australian waters,
although the government disputes this.

An inquiry by
the Australian senate last March disclosed that the Australian navy had
extensive prior knowledge that the Siev-X was in a perilous state. In other
words, the people on board could have been saved. In April, Rear Admiral
Geoffrey Smith, commander of the navy's "border protection"
department, testified three times under oath that he knew nothing about the
boat until it had sunk. Jane Halton, a special adviser to the prime minister on
asylum-seekers, made the same denial. Then on 22 May, the commander of
Australia's Coastwatch revealed that the navy had known all along the boat's
date of departure, its intended destination, unseaworthiness and gross
overcrowding. Smith hurriedly retracted his original denial, and on 15 June,
Admiral Chris Ritchie, the incoming chief of the navy, admitted that the boat
"never came within our search area and we did not change our search area
specifically to look for [it]".

It is
questionable whether the navy let the ship sink, but what is clear is that
Australia's defence forces have become immersed in corrupt, callous and racist
policy designed to keep the Howard government in power. Navy personnel have
been ordered to act as jailers; and prior to their accredited heroics in
Afghanistan, Australian SAS troops were sent into action against a Norwegian
ship whose captain had rescued asylum-seekers from drowning in Australian
waters. A handful of tenacious journalists have told these stories for as long
they can, but a consensual silence inevitably descends on what George Orwell
called "smelly little orthodoxies". The price Australians are paying
for this silence and compliance is not immediately obvious in these midsummer
days. But Australian social democracy, which was achieved by the struggle of
the ordinary people of my parents' and grandparents' generations, is being
subverted if not dismantled. (The minimum wage, an eight-hour working day,
pensions, child benefits, the secret ballot were all won first in Australia.)

A "free
trade" treaty with the United States is being negotiated, mostly in
secret, giving the Americans a version of the one-sided North American Free
Trade Agreement and de facto legal control over everything from Australia's
quarantine laws and the pricing of drugs to the spread of genetically modified
food and the content of Australian television. There is virtually no public
discussion about this surrender of sovereignty.

And as the Bush
gang destroys America's Bill of Rights, so the Howard gang follows suit with,
as Scott Burchill of Deakin University in Melbourne wrote, "confected wars
against imaginary or exaggerated threats [as] an effective tool of social
conformity and a powerful antidote to political dissent". In a land
plentiful with academics, Burchill is one of a handful who have dared speak
out. As for the federal Labor opposition, its mostly invisible leader, Simon
Crean, has commended the CIA's assassination of "terrorist suspects".
With no public scrutiny, the Labor government of New South Wales is enacting
legislation that gives its police force totalitarian powers in the "war on
terror". No longer, says a bill being rushed through parliament, can
police behaviour "be challenged, reviewed, quashed or called into question
on any grounds whatsoever before any court, tribunal, body or person in any
legal proceedings".

The
great American sage Mark Twain loved Australia. He described it as "a
place where the ordinary man is king, or thinks he is". In The Mysterious
Stranger (1916), Twain also wrote about "statesmen [who] invent cheap
lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be
glad of these conscience-soothing falsities . . . and will thank God for the
better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception".

John Pilger is one of the world’s most renowned investigative
journalists and documentary filmmaker. His latest book is The New Rulers of the
World (Verso, 2002). Visit John Pilger’s website at: http://www.johnpilger.com